The End of the Game (72 page)

I repeated it, shaking my head. “Something Ganver said when the shadows pursued us into the Maze.”

Cat looked at Murzy, then both of them at Sarah, who shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I never heard of it.”

Bets denied any knowledge of shadow-eaters, as did Margaret Foxmitten, but Dodie spoke up—she who had said little or nothing until now, youngest of the seven as she was—”The Gardener? Oh, I’ve heard of the Gardener.”

“Well, tell, child. Don’t be mysterious!” Bets was as impatient as ever. The two years or so I’d been gone hadn’t changed her.

“I’m n-not being mysterious,” Dodie stuttered. “It’s just I don’t know what to say. My grandda, that’s my mum’s da, he used to tell tales of the Gardener. Tales he had from his grandda and he from his, way back, before all the people left the marches.”

“Well? Well?”

“Do you want me to tell you all the tales? There’s dozens.”

“Why don’t you start with one exemplary one.” This was Cat, being academic. “Start with one you heard frequently.”

“Well, let’s see.” Dodie thought for a moment. “There’s the one about the three bunwits trying to steal the Gardener’s greens and losing their fur on the fence, so the Gardener turned them into fish. And there was the one about the Gardener fooling the tree rats into eating webwillow instead of table roots and how they got so sick they never came near the garden again. And the one about the Gardener feeding shadow to his turnips. . . .”

“The one about what?” Murzy, amazed.

“The one about the Gardener feeding shadow to his turnips?”

“Tell us that one,” said Murzy, moving toward a circle of stones, where we all sat down like a coven of crows, looking expectantly at Dodie. She cleared her throat nervously, smoothed her shirt down over her trews, folded her hands as though about to sing, and told us.

“The Gardener, he had a fine crop of turnips growing along in the hot time, burgeoning big and getting somewhat ahead of themselves in the growth department, beginning to push at each other in the rows and get argumentative over root space. Every morning the Gardener would come down to the garden to look them over, and every morning what did he see but more of them limping about with their roots all twisted and bruises on their cheeks.

“‘Enough is enough,’ said the Gardener. ‘What’s the matter with all you turnips, you can’t get along?’

“ `It’s crowded we are,’ said the turnips, `so crowded there’s no air to breathe or sun to gollop up or dark, fertile wet dirt to suck. Time we was thinned out, I say.’

“But there was an uproar over that, you may be sure, for none of the turnips planned to be the ones thinned. And sure as sure, the Gardener hadn’t planned to thin them, either, for he wasn’t one to eat his garden stuff. He was more in the nature of an experimenter, trying this thing and then that thing, and some he’d turn loose in the world and some he’d root out entirely, because that was his job to do for the whole world. So far he’d been very satisfied with the turnips and wasn’t inclined to thin them at all, but he had to admit the space was running short to put them. There was dark wet dirt in the forest, but no sun, and good sun on the mountain, but no dirt. Air was no particular problem, but finding all three together, that was something else.

“ `You could clear some of these trees,’ said the turnips, `to make space.’

“‘No,’ said the Gardener. `The trees are some I’ve been growing since they were seeds, a new kind I’m mighty fond of.’

“ `Well, you could knock down that rocky mountain there to the north with the three poky peaks on top. It’s an ugly thing and it would make good gardening there.’

“‘No,’ said the Gardener. ‘That mountain has seven whole tribes of mushrooms growing on it I’ve been working on for a hundred or so years. There’s just no space to be had unless I move out of the marches and start another garden down in a valley somewhere.’ Everyone in the garden knew the Gardener wouldn’t want to do that. He was a mighty secretive fellow and didn’t have much truck with other beings, except for my great-great-great- a hundred times great-grandda, who showed him a new way to prune fruit trees flat against a sunny wall.

“So he thought and he thought. There wasn’t any space in the forest, and no space on the roads, but there was the Shadow Tower back in the marches, and there was space around that. So the Gardener said to the turnips, Whyn’t we go off through the trees here to the space around the Shadow Tower? Every evening the Bell rings the shadows out, and they’re dark as any dirt and full of whatever they’ve sucked up around the world. They’ll be lying thick on the ground, there, and maybe you can catch a few.

“So that’s what the turnips did. They walked themselves a little way through the woods to the place near the Shadow Tower where all the trees stood back away from it. And they plunked themselves down around the Tower, their leaves spread out, and when the Shadowbell rang and all the shadows came out thick as leaves falling in the cold time, well, those turnips moved all their little hairy roots into the shadow and sucked all the dark, moist stuff in them up.

“And that’s how the Gardener’s turnips grew and grew, but he didn’t let them out into the world for fear they’d eat all the shadow that was, so he kept them there in his garden except for every dusktime when the Shadowbell rang.”

Dodie unfolded her hands, wiped a few beads of perspiration from her forehead, and plumped herself down, grinning.

“Well,” said Murzy. “Isn’t that interesting.”

“Myth survival?” asked Cat in her usual teacherish voice. “Or something real turned legend, do you think?”

“Whichever! It is worth our time to find out!”

I gathered from this they perceived a kernel of truth in the story Dodie had told. “How . . .” I started to ask, only to shut my mouth, for the others were already digging into their lockets or boots for the pool fragments each had been given at oath-taking time. I hadn’t had mine out of my locket in the last two years, and the locket was in my pouch. By the time I had my pie-shaped fragment ready, the others had laid theirs upon a flat stone, and only mine was needed to make a circle. “Do you know what the pool stuff is?” I asked pedantically, ready to lecture on the subject. “I found out. . . .”

“Yes, dear. Of course,” said Sarah in her soft voice. “Of course we know. Now do put your piece in so we can look.”

Abashed, I pushed my piece into the circle and sat down with the others, peering into the silvery circle that began to shimmer once the pool was completed.

“A mountain,” said Murzy in a firm voice. “A mountain with three peaks. In the Shadowmarches.”

Darkness swam across the pool, then light, then darkness once again. Something flapped horribly within the pool, seemed to look out at us, then fled. We seven reached out to take hands, making a circle around the pool, bending our will to Murzy’s in order that she might See.

“A three-peaked mountain,” she repeated insistently. “A mountain in the Shadowmarches, with three peaks. . . .”

Something floated up at us; not a mountain. A Tower. Black and tall. Except for the color, I knew it. It was the Tower of the Daylight Bell in reverse image. Dark as coal. Shadow swarmed at its base, around its walls, poured from the arched openings at its top. Something seemed to peer out at us from those openings.

Patiently, Murzy repeated, “A mountain with three peaks.”

The Tower dwindled. We were looking down on it from above. It dwindled still further, and I could see the fold of valley that held it, the road spur that ran to it, the road that ran past it farther down the hill. Against the sky was the mountain with three peaks. This, too, diminished until we were looking down on it. There was the sea, to the west, and the line of road east and west through the marches, and to the north of the road a faint glimmering, as though a star burned there. “Enough,” said Murzy in a weak voice. “Enough for now. We have the general direction. Let’s get closer before we try to see in greater detail.”

As it was, it was morning before we set out. Murzy was in no condition to travel until then. Seeing takes a great deal out of one, particularly when it is done purposefully in this way, not merely allowing any random vision to happen into one’s head. One does it at cost, and one weighs the risk first, as Murzy had done.

The starlight glimmering on the envisioned map had marked our own position relative to the three-peaked mountain. We needed to go on south until we encountered the remains of an Old Road. Cat estimated two days’ travel, and about noon the second day I took off my shoes. It had been some time since I’d done any footseeing—and longer since I’d gone barefoot for any period of time, so my feet were sore by evening.

We struck Old Road early the next morning and turned west upon it, me leading, for it was virtually invisible under drifted soil and leaves and the growth of centuries. We would need to go a day’s travel west, Cat said, rubbing salve into my feet, which made them look even dirtier. If Footseer had not already been my proper Wize-ard nickname, I would have been called Jinian Dustboots by the end of that day. As it was, Dodie found she, too, could feel the road in her toes, so she was given the sobriquet. Dodie Dustboots. She seemed very proud of it.

In midafternoon we stopped to use the fragments again. The glimmer that was us was almost due south of the three-peaked mountain, and when the clouds lifted along about evening, we could see it. “Show us the garden of the Gardener,” Murzy demanded, and the fragment flowed up and down the slopes, stopping at last on the southern slope, about halfway up. Sighing, she let the image go, and we wearily prepared a sensible meal before curling into our blankets for the night.

“Do you think it’s really there?” Dodie asked me in a whisper, the firelight making a specter’s face of her, all black and orange.

“Who knows. The fragment showed us something.” “Maybe it’s only ruins.”

“Maybe.” Possible, I thought. If it were really there, why hadn’t the Gardener done something about the ever-encroaching shadow? Even as I thought the question, I knew the answer. Because whoever or whatever the Gardener was, it hadn’t been his job. Just as it hadn’t been the Eesties’ job. Just as it hadn’t been anyone’s. This started to make me angry and tense, so I set the thought aside and thought of Peter instead. “At the Old South Road City,” I said to him, wherever he might be. “My oath’s about run out, Peter Shifter. Please be at the Old South Road City.”

Silence and the stars. No point in crying about it. I put Peter out of my mind—mocking laughter from certain parts of my body—and went off to sleep.

We climbed north from the road the next morning. After a time we came upon a flattened, twisty trail through the trees, a place animals had walked for many years, zigzagging first east then west but always northward. We followed along it, noticing how it avoided the steep places and the rock outcroppings and how it made clever crossing use of narrow places in the streamlets. We had just stopped next to a fringe of tall trees to catch our breath when we all heard a tiny, shrill voice crying, “I tell you, the ground is shaking. There are feet coming, and not feet that belong here. No zeller trying to get through your fence, Gardener. People feet!”

At least that’s what I heard. The others, so they told me, heard only a shrill piping, rather like a bird’s inconsequent whistle. When they started to move on, I stopped them, whispering what I had heard into their cupped ears.

“Just behind this fringe of trees,” I said. “Shall I creep through to see what’s there?”

They clasped hands, all at once, without even conferring, and began to do Egg in the Hollow for me, making me as invisible as they could on short notice. I took this for an affirmative answer to my question and began sneaking through the underbrush, wishing I were Peter so that I could slither without making a sound.

As it was, things whipped about just a bit. I came out on the other side looking down into a small, flat-floored valley, trees all around and the three-peaked mountain staring down upon it from the north. Garden filled the entire valley, from rail fence on the north to rail fence on the south, fruit trees espaliered along a wall, great pots of flowers here and there, orderly rows of this and that. No.
Mostly
orderly rows of this and that. On the near side of the garden was a perfect jumble of plants, some with only their tufty leaves showing and the others walking about on their roots complaining in high, shrill voices about the overcrowding.

Now “turnip” is a word we use for any kind of bulbous-rooted edible plant. There’s no one plant called “turnip,” just as there’s no one tree called “willow.” It’s either webwillow or gray willow or grease willow or some other kind. So it’s either blood turnip or sour turnip or swamp turnip. These turnips weren’t any of those. They were big, fat, white with a blue belt and with great fluffy tufts of leaves coming out of their tops. At the bottom they were bifurcated, trifurcated, multifurcated into rooty legs or leggy roots on which they wandered about in a rather desultory way, sometimes tripping each other out of what seemed to be sheer ill nature.

One of them stood at the feet of a very tall being wearing a green robe, shrilling out, “Feet, I tell you, Gardener. People feet.” A slit in one side of the turnip seemed to serve for a mouth, and there were several eyelike protuberances on its body.

“Well, and so?” said a deep bass voice, rumbling like a distant roll of thunder. “People feet. So?”

The Gardener was half again as tall as I, not so slender as to seem unnatural but still quite skinny. He had a gaunt, blank face which looked as though he did not often use it for anything. And when I stood up, brushing the leaves off my shirt and undoing the invisibility spell with one gesture, he did not seem at all surprised. “People feet,” he repeated as though it had been some kind of incantation. “Well.” His face had no expression at all.

“I am one of the people,” I shrilled in close approximation of turnip talk, then lowering my voice and addressing the Gardener in common language. “Can you understand me?”

He confronted me with no change in his face, not so much as a furrow between his eyes indicating he had heard me. “Can you understand me?” I asked again in the vegetable language.